So good! 🔥🔥🔦🤍🕊️🕊️ Your writing is incredible. Explaining truth so perfectly. The illustration of the seasons and what they mean biologically... I wish everyone could read this.
This is so powerful and something most people never even contemplate.
Not only is it crucial to honor the natural protocol for each season yearly - also we must honor the natural protocol for the seasons of our life. There is always a microcosm and a macrocosm.
As I was reading your essay, it brought up something I have been contemplating the past several years and have not been able to untangle enough to write about it. After studying much anthropology and the bible, doing my best to understand the nature of the earliest humans, it has hit me hard as to how vastly far away we are from our nature.
I never fully contemplated the importance of yearly seasonal changes - I have focused more on life seasonal changes. You flushed it out so succinctly here.
It is also great timing for me because this past week I have not been able to be productive at all - ultimately I got sick because I was allowing my subconscious conditioning (ego) to force me into working. You reminded me that the Holy Spirit was doing his best to guide me to be in alignment with the season.
Beautifully written, I'm from Holland and we definitely have seasons in life. Referring to them daily when I teach my own seasonal compas method in my family therapy practice.
What is your view on seasons for the church in countries located near the equator where there is definitely less fluctuation in weather conditions.
I was humbled by this thought a few days ago since we're on vacation and spending every day in the sun while it's cold back home.. Me and my husband were discussing this earlier today.
Equatorial churches have the advantage: they can’t confuse the pattern with the weather. Your seasonal compass method works precisely because you're tracking the true architecture.
Seasons aren’t what you see outside they’re how creation actually works.
My therapy is called Holistic Attachment Therapy and it is indeed based in somatic, psychological and pneumatic reframing of the mind towards the word of God instead of the lies the secular world tells us all. A journey through seasons of life remembering God and reestablishing a relationship with Him.
God’s truth spreads and Babylon’s lies can’t hold it. When a society aligns with Him the fruit is undeniable, and people start seeking the meaning found only in God.
Rocka, there is a real pastoral instinct in this piece, and a number of your practical conclusions are ones a Catholic could affirm in substance: modern life often demands a mechanically uniform output that ignores human limits; rest is not laziness; the created order does teach us something about rhythm; and Scripture does command sabbath. Where your argument becomes unreliable is where you convert a legitimate prudential observation into a grand, totalizing diagnosis (“Rome edited it out,” “Babylon needs perpetual summer,” “neuroscience is proving what Scripture said,” etc.) and then treat that diagnosis as if it were settled fact. It isn’t.
First, your “seasonal protocol” is being smuggled into texts that do not bear it. Genesis 8:22 states that seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter will continue while the earth remains. That is a promise of providential stability, not a command establishing a four-part spiritual-operational framework binding on everyone in every climate, vocation, and stage of history. Likewise, John 12:24 is not “systems documentation” about your winter framework. In context, Christ is speaking about His own impending death as the condition for the fruitfulness of His mission, and by extension the logic of discipleship: losing one’s life in order to find it. You are taking a cruciform teaching about redemptive self-gift and collapsing it into a productivity-and-recovery metaphor. You can draw an analogy, but you cannot treat your analogy as the meaning of the passage.
Second, the Catholic tradition already has a far more precise, more coherent, and more deeply human account of rest than your “winter crown” rhetoric provides. The Lord’s Day is not a seasonal hack; it is a moral and liturgical obligation rooted in worship, the dignity of the person, and the ordering of time toward God. The Church’s year also builds rhythm into life through Advent, Lent, feasts, fasts, and ordinary time. These are not “Rome deleting winter.” They are the Church’s long, public pedagogy of discipline and joy, penitence and celebration, preparation and fulfillment. If you want to indict modernity’s constant-output ideology, you do not need an empire-conspiracy narrative; you need the older, sturdier categories of virtue, sabbath, and rightly ordered loves.
Third, your Rome claims are historically careless. The “ancient agricultural calendar Rome edited out” is a rhetorical invention. Rome did not erase the biblical sabbatical and jubilee laws from Jewish life; those laws were covenantal stipulations for Israel in the land with a priestly and civil structure, and their concrete implementation was always contested and complex. Christianity did not “delete” sabbath because empires needed productivity. Christians worship on Sunday because Christ rose on Sunday and because the apostolic Church gathered on “the first day of the week.” The Church’s move from Saturday to Sunday is not an imperial productivity plot; it is a Christological and ecclesial fact from the earliest period of Christian life. You can argue that industrial capitalism and digital life have assaulted rest; that is an argument with real historical evidence. But you undermine yourself when you blame “Rome” for basic Christian liturgical development and then treat your alternative as “what our ancestors probably knew.”
Fourth, your neuroscience framing is again an overreach. Studies observing EEG patterns near death do not tell us that “the soul integrates what the summer produced,” nor do they force a theological conclusion about “transition protocol.” Catholic teaching is clear that biological processes can accompany dying without reducing death to biology; but it is equally clear that you cannot baptize a tentative neurological observation into proof of your speculative metaphysic. If you want to speak responsibly, you say: “Some researchers have observed brain activity near death; we do not know its meaning; in any case, the Church’s hope rests on Christ’s Resurrection, not on EEG traces.” Anything stronger is rhetoric posing as science.
Fifth, you repeatedly moralize tiredness in a way that risks spiritual harm. You tell readers they are not experiencing burnout, but “seasonal rebellion,” and you imply that accepting your framework is the path to “resurrection trust.” That is not pastoral care; it is spiritualizing a complex set of psychological, medical, economic, and vocational factors into a single category (“rebellion”) and then offering your product as the remedy. Some people are exhausted because they are disordered. Many are exhausted because they are carrying real duties under real constraints: infants, sick parents, multiple jobs, chronic illness, poverty, trauma. Catholic moral theology distinguishes culpability from suffering. Your piece blurs that line.
Here is the more orthodox, more accurate way to say what you are reaching for. Human beings are embodied, finite creatures. We require rest. God commands worship and sets rhythms into creation and into covenant life that protect human dignity and cultivate virtue. Modern economic and technological systems often tempt us toward acedia, anxiety, and a false identity built on output; they also often impose unjust burdens that make rest difficult. The remedy is not a pseudo-canonical “winter crown protocol” or an anti-Rome storyline. The remedy is conversion of life: sabbath and Sunday worship, discipline with screens and work, prudence about limits, justice about labor expectations, solidarity with those whose burdens are heavier, and the steady cultivation of temperance and fortitude. None of this denies nature’s lessons. It simply refuses to turn nature into a totalizing oracle and refuses to turn Scripture into a set of productivity metaphors.
So yes: stop pretending you are a machine, and stop letting anyone shame you for human limits. But also stop pretending your framework is “what Scripture documented three thousand years ago.” It is not. It is a modern construct — sometimes useful as a metaphor — inflated into a quasi-revelation, bolstered by shaky history and overclaimed science, and then used to sell a program. If you want to serve your readers with integrity, strip away the conspiracy scaffolding, stop forcing biblical texts to carry your categories, and present rest as the Church presents it: a matter of worship, virtue, justice, and the truth that man is not made for production, but for God.
“The machine needs you in summer mode permanently because winter, actual winter, where you stop producing and start consolidating, represents lost revenue. Your exhaustion isn’t incidental. It’s the cost of doing business in a civilization structured around seasonal violation.”
This essay really resonates with me. Are you familiar with Paul Kingsnorth? His latest book is titled, ‘Against the Machine’. His recent post on his substack makes me think of what this piece is about. I sent a link of this piece to him. I believe it will be helpful.
One of the reasons I didn’t like living in South Florida was because we only had one season. Hot. And then when I ended up in Washington state literally on the other side of the country, we had one season. Winter. So finally I settled here in ARKansas and we have four seasons. I just don’t like winter too much after living nine years where it snowed six months of the year!
So good! 🔥🔥🔦🤍🕊️🕊️ Your writing is incredible. Explaining truth so perfectly. The illustration of the seasons and what they mean biologically... I wish everyone could read this.
Thanks brother 🙏
Sister 😁 but no worries at all! 🙏🏼
This is so powerful and something most people never even contemplate.
Not only is it crucial to honor the natural protocol for each season yearly - also we must honor the natural protocol for the seasons of our life. There is always a microcosm and a macrocosm.
As I was reading your essay, it brought up something I have been contemplating the past several years and have not been able to untangle enough to write about it. After studying much anthropology and the bible, doing my best to understand the nature of the earliest humans, it has hit me hard as to how vastly far away we are from our nature.
I never fully contemplated the importance of yearly seasonal changes - I have focused more on life seasonal changes. You flushed it out so succinctly here.
It is also great timing for me because this past week I have not been able to be productive at all - ultimately I got sick because I was allowing my subconscious conditioning (ego) to force me into working. You reminded me that the Holy Spirit was doing his best to guide me to be in alignment with the season.
Thank you for your great work, my friend.
This is powerful, this has taught me a lot. This is so GOOD!!
Beautifully written, I'm from Holland and we definitely have seasons in life. Referring to them daily when I teach my own seasonal compas method in my family therapy practice.
What is your view on seasons for the church in countries located near the equator where there is definitely less fluctuation in weather conditions.
I was humbled by this thought a few days ago since we're on vacation and spending every day in the sun while it's cold back home.. Me and my husband were discussing this earlier today.
Thank you!
Excellent question. You've nailed the core flaw in most seasonal models, they're climate metaphors not covenant architecture.
The equatorial answer is simple: Seasons are operational modes not weather reports.
Three universal markers beyond climate:
1. Cosmic Calendar - Solar equinoxes & agricultural pulses (dry/rain)
2. Human Biography - Formation → execution → wisdom → legacy
3. Spiritual Rhythms - Planting, growth, harvest, rest (Genesis 8:22)
Equatorial churches have the advantage: they can’t confuse the pattern with the weather. Your seasonal compass method works precisely because you're tracking the true architecture.
Seasons aren’t what you see outside they’re how creation actually works.
Yes! Thanks for the extra insight.
My therapy is called Holistic Attachment Therapy and it is indeed based in somatic, psychological and pneumatic reframing of the mind towards the word of God instead of the lies the secular world tells us all. A journey through seasons of life remembering God and reestablishing a relationship with Him.
I love reading your essays. Thanks!
I’m glad you’re enjoying the articles Vienna.
God’s truth spreads and Babylon’s lies can’t hold it. When a society aligns with Him the fruit is undeniable, and people start seeking the meaning found only in God.
Excellent article!
Are you orthodox? I’m just curious, no agenda.
Rocka, there is a real pastoral instinct in this piece, and a number of your practical conclusions are ones a Catholic could affirm in substance: modern life often demands a mechanically uniform output that ignores human limits; rest is not laziness; the created order does teach us something about rhythm; and Scripture does command sabbath. Where your argument becomes unreliable is where you convert a legitimate prudential observation into a grand, totalizing diagnosis (“Rome edited it out,” “Babylon needs perpetual summer,” “neuroscience is proving what Scripture said,” etc.) and then treat that diagnosis as if it were settled fact. It isn’t.
First, your “seasonal protocol” is being smuggled into texts that do not bear it. Genesis 8:22 states that seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter will continue while the earth remains. That is a promise of providential stability, not a command establishing a four-part spiritual-operational framework binding on everyone in every climate, vocation, and stage of history. Likewise, John 12:24 is not “systems documentation” about your winter framework. In context, Christ is speaking about His own impending death as the condition for the fruitfulness of His mission, and by extension the logic of discipleship: losing one’s life in order to find it. You are taking a cruciform teaching about redemptive self-gift and collapsing it into a productivity-and-recovery metaphor. You can draw an analogy, but you cannot treat your analogy as the meaning of the passage.
Second, the Catholic tradition already has a far more precise, more coherent, and more deeply human account of rest than your “winter crown” rhetoric provides. The Lord’s Day is not a seasonal hack; it is a moral and liturgical obligation rooted in worship, the dignity of the person, and the ordering of time toward God. The Church’s year also builds rhythm into life through Advent, Lent, feasts, fasts, and ordinary time. These are not “Rome deleting winter.” They are the Church’s long, public pedagogy of discipline and joy, penitence and celebration, preparation and fulfillment. If you want to indict modernity’s constant-output ideology, you do not need an empire-conspiracy narrative; you need the older, sturdier categories of virtue, sabbath, and rightly ordered loves.
Third, your Rome claims are historically careless. The “ancient agricultural calendar Rome edited out” is a rhetorical invention. Rome did not erase the biblical sabbatical and jubilee laws from Jewish life; those laws were covenantal stipulations for Israel in the land with a priestly and civil structure, and their concrete implementation was always contested and complex. Christianity did not “delete” sabbath because empires needed productivity. Christians worship on Sunday because Christ rose on Sunday and because the apostolic Church gathered on “the first day of the week.” The Church’s move from Saturday to Sunday is not an imperial productivity plot; it is a Christological and ecclesial fact from the earliest period of Christian life. You can argue that industrial capitalism and digital life have assaulted rest; that is an argument with real historical evidence. But you undermine yourself when you blame “Rome” for basic Christian liturgical development and then treat your alternative as “what our ancestors probably knew.”
Fourth, your neuroscience framing is again an overreach. Studies observing EEG patterns near death do not tell us that “the soul integrates what the summer produced,” nor do they force a theological conclusion about “transition protocol.” Catholic teaching is clear that biological processes can accompany dying without reducing death to biology; but it is equally clear that you cannot baptize a tentative neurological observation into proof of your speculative metaphysic. If you want to speak responsibly, you say: “Some researchers have observed brain activity near death; we do not know its meaning; in any case, the Church’s hope rests on Christ’s Resurrection, not on EEG traces.” Anything stronger is rhetoric posing as science.
Fifth, you repeatedly moralize tiredness in a way that risks spiritual harm. You tell readers they are not experiencing burnout, but “seasonal rebellion,” and you imply that accepting your framework is the path to “resurrection trust.” That is not pastoral care; it is spiritualizing a complex set of psychological, medical, economic, and vocational factors into a single category (“rebellion”) and then offering your product as the remedy. Some people are exhausted because they are disordered. Many are exhausted because they are carrying real duties under real constraints: infants, sick parents, multiple jobs, chronic illness, poverty, trauma. Catholic moral theology distinguishes culpability from suffering. Your piece blurs that line.
Here is the more orthodox, more accurate way to say what you are reaching for. Human beings are embodied, finite creatures. We require rest. God commands worship and sets rhythms into creation and into covenant life that protect human dignity and cultivate virtue. Modern economic and technological systems often tempt us toward acedia, anxiety, and a false identity built on output; they also often impose unjust burdens that make rest difficult. The remedy is not a pseudo-canonical “winter crown protocol” or an anti-Rome storyline. The remedy is conversion of life: sabbath and Sunday worship, discipline with screens and work, prudence about limits, justice about labor expectations, solidarity with those whose burdens are heavier, and the steady cultivation of temperance and fortitude. None of this denies nature’s lessons. It simply refuses to turn nature into a totalizing oracle and refuses to turn Scripture into a set of productivity metaphors.
So yes: stop pretending you are a machine, and stop letting anyone shame you for human limits. But also stop pretending your framework is “what Scripture documented three thousand years ago.” It is not. It is a modern construct — sometimes useful as a metaphor — inflated into a quasi-revelation, bolstered by shaky history and overclaimed science, and then used to sell a program. If you want to serve your readers with integrity, strip away the conspiracy scaffolding, stop forcing biblical texts to carry your categories, and present rest as the Church presents it: a matter of worship, virtue, justice, and the truth that man is not made for production, but for God.
Thank you good sir. This opened my eyes in a totally unexpected way. Now I know why I am feeling as I do here in Canada (Alberta).
“The machine needs you in summer mode permanently because winter, actual winter, where you stop producing and start consolidating, represents lost revenue. Your exhaustion isn’t incidental. It’s the cost of doing business in a civilization structured around seasonal violation.”
This essay really resonates with me. Are you familiar with Paul Kingsnorth? His latest book is titled, ‘Against the Machine’. His recent post on his substack makes me think of what this piece is about. I sent a link of this piece to him. I believe it will be helpful.
One of the reasons I didn’t like living in South Florida was because we only had one season. Hot. And then when I ended up in Washington state literally on the other side of the country, we had one season. Winter. So finally I settled here in ARKansas and we have four seasons. I just don’t like winter too much after living nine years where it snowed six months of the year!
Interesting read.
Interesting approach. I find symmetry.
I read a mismatch between what our civ teaches us and what lived reality shows us.
This cannot continue. Thank you for challenging